Milan Bedroom:
I was raised in an old farmhouse in Milan, Michigan. I started working on a collage in my bedroom in late 1992, early 1993. Around that time I was meant to have graduated from High School but I didn't. I was always on the verge of suicide. I hated my life and my living conditions. Being gay in a Baptist household was bad enough, but our home was dirty, insect & pet infested, dusty, numbingly cold in winter and disturbingly hot in the summer. It just wasn't a great place to live. I rebelled and used the collage I created to distract myself and cope with all that I couldn't control in my surroundings. I don't know what inspired me to begin with, but I used a staple gun and black trash bags to cover the walls and ceiling, then started putting up pictures. I was a big fan of Giger, so I started with his artwork and then built on that. The photos I have of my room then are old and many of them are only fragments; others I can't find. But this is what I've been able to piece together. I continued with this collage until leaving home in January of 1997. Without warning me, most of the pictures that were collected and used for this collage at considerable personal cost, were ripped from the room that hosted them and burnt to cinders by my family. This hurt me deeply, but didn't prevent me from dreaming of a new collage, which failed to materialize until almost a decade later.
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